Jo Johnson: It is indeed a beautiful day. However, it is tinged with some poignancy and sadness because the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), was a great supporter of transparency in everything he did in his last role. He was also a great supporter of this Bill. It was presented by the then Secretary of State and supported by the former Prime Minister and the current Prime Minister, reflecting the commitment across the two Administrations that have followed the general election to push forward these reforms and to transparency as a great driver of quality and choice in our higher education system.
Amendments 131 and 132 relate to the disclosure of the remuneration and compensation of OFS board members. I welcome transparency, which is a vital element in the effective functioning of the sector, and the Bill champions transparency from universities by requiring them to publish information on their records. Although we do not oppose the intention behind the amendments, we do not accept them on the grounds that such specification is unnecessary in the Bill.
I can confirm to the hon. Member for Blackpool South that once they are appointed, and in the usual way, the OFS chair and chief executive’s salary will be included on a list of senior civil servants and senior officials in Departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies that is made publically available on an annual basis.
On the transparency of expenses, allowances and compensation, ultimately the chair and chief executive will be responsible for accounting for OFS expenditure and the finer details of their approach to transparency will be for them to determine. However, the Government are committed to greater transparency, and we expect that, in their annual reporting, NDPBs will publish data on board member remuneration, allowances, expenses and other payments, such as compensation, in line with guidance in the Treasury’s financial reporting manual. I fully expect that the OFS will follow this practice.
Therefore, as the amendments refer to approaches to transparency that are already common practice among NDPBs through successful delivery of the Government’s transparency agenda, the provisions are unnecessary and would restrict future flexibility. If legislation starts to stipulate specific provisions of this type for public bodies, they will inevitably soon become out of date as the transparency agenda progresses. That may then require further primary legislation to deal with any inconsistencies or anomalies that arise. The Government therefore do not propose to accept the amendment and I respectfully ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw it.

Gordon Marsden: I rise to support the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, and I commend her for her argument. I would spare her blushes, but as chair of the all-party universities group she is in an admirable position to take soundings from across the sector on this matter, which are of considerable concern. Before I address some of them, I endorse what the hon. Member for Glasgow North West just said about the Scottish dimension. When we debate part 4 of the Bill, we will discuss the new structure of research, about which there was rightly some sharp questioning in the evidence sessions. Given what I called in the evidence session the variable geometry of the Bill in relation to UKRI, the OFS and the research councils, it is essential that there is co-operation to ensure confidence and good relations between the devolved Administrations and the Westminster Government. I entirely endorse what the hon. Lady and her colleague, the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, have said.
On committees, again they can be set up to be what we want them to be: a token, a sop, or something that does some useful good. In the modest but nevertheless  substantial way in which my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham has phrased her amendment, she has struck the right balance.
I will not be outwith the subject of the Bill when I refer to the situation that occurred in 2007, because it is relevant. I will not get into the issues relating to the machinery of government today, because we will debate them properly under part 4—the implications for this and the issues to do with research in connection with the new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, as opposed to the Department for Education, are complex, and we will want to discuss them later.
To go back to the machinery of government changes that took place in 2007, before what became BIS and the Department for Education were set up, I was on the Select Committee that questioned David Bell—Sir David Bell, as he is now—the chief executive officer about the relationship between the two organisations was to be. He said that he would continue as chief executive of DFE, Ian Watmore would continue as chief executive of BIS and they would have regular discussions. I said that sounded as if they would have two or three pleasant but meaningful lunches during the year to chat about things, and they would get on very well.
The crucial thing, however, is what happens lower down the food chain, if I may put it that way. Unless there is co-operation and collaboration between the people who do the day-to-day work in the two Departments, the co-operation will not work properly. That is directly relevant to my hon. Friend’s amendment. If the committee is established, it is important that it is not simply two or three agreeable lunches between the high-ups, but a meaningful, continuing and regular communication between UKRI and the OFS.
As I have said, the views of what I might describe as the higher education fraternity and sorority are pretty strong. My hon. Friend has already referred to the evidence given by Pam Tatlow of MillionPlus. Cambridge University, in its written evidence to the Committee, stated:
“The Bill in its current form gives some recognition to the relationship between teaching and research”,
and this is the other broad issue, apart from the desirability of getting the new research structures right and in co-operation; it is also important to get the relationship between teaching and research right.
Cambridge University’s evidence went on to state that
“the Office for Students…and UK Research and Innovation...must work together if required to do so by the Secretary of State, and must also share information”,
with an important caveat:
“However, this provides no burden of responsibility for collaboration outside of any specific request from the Secretary of State. There is also little indication of how oversight will be given to the entire university…portfolio… This risks creating an artificial separation of functions”.
As my hon. Friend also touched on, the university declared that it had
“a particular concern regarding oversight of postgraduate students. Although there have been some assurances from Government that UKRI will have responsibility for funding and OfS will be responsible for their regulation, this is unclear in the legislation.”
Universities UK has offered similar concerns in  its note to Committee members and, more widely, on 25 August, when it stated that there was a “substantial need” for collaboration between the OFS and UKRI, and that there was a “lack of clarity” as to which one would lead on cross-cutting institution or sector-wide issues, such as knowledge exchange. Also, since science and education are in separate Departments for the first time—this goes back to the point I made about the machinery of government changes—there is particular need for strong planning. The document that Universities UK circulated expands on that further.
Other organisations have also commented. It is particularly important to look at what some of the key research bodies have said. The Wellcome Trust expressed its concern that the separation of the functions of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which is what will happen in the process of setting up UKRI and the OFS, could break the links between teaching and research if not well handled. There is no suggestion that that is the deliberate policy of the Government—why would it be?—but you and I, Sir Edward, have been in this place for long enough to know the perils of unintended consequences. When new structures are set up with lots of grand words and gestures, the peril of the unintended consequence is not putting in place the safeguards and the detail that would allow the two newish departments to co-operate. We are trying to be helpful to the Government by flagging up the concerns from the various bodies that have written to us all.
Whatever the Minister says about the specifics of the amendment, I hope that he will go into some detail—if not today, perhaps in future weeks with a letter to members of the Committee—spelling out what he has said today and reassuring all those who want the new structure of UKRI and the OFS to work. We will talk about the broader issues with the research structure in part 4, but we would like some reassurance now that the image of the two agreeable lunches and not much else happening further down the food chain, which I evoked in 2007, will not be replicated in the relationship between the OFS and UKRI.

Wes Streeting: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir Edward.
Amendments 15, 20 and 28 all deal with the responsibilities and duties of the proposed office for students in relation to access and participation. We all know that there have been significant strides to widen participation in higher education and ensure fair access to our most selective universities, but much more progress is needed in both respects. Amendment 15 would place a statutory duty on the office for students to ensure fair access and to promote wider participation by publishing its strategy to ensure both aims. That strategy would be reviewed and updated at least every three years and would enable the sector, the wider public and Parliament to engage actively in the debate about how best the OFS can fulfil its duties. I hope that the amendment is uncontentious and that the Government will be able to accept it.
Amendment 20 would place a duty on the office for students to work with the Institute for Apprenticeships to develop more higher and degree-level apprenticeship places. That would address two issues. While it is right to ensure wider participation in higher education and fair access to our most selective universities, there is a degree of public cynicism and scepticism. With the effort to get more people, particularly younger people, into higher education and to enable then to go, sometimes there is pressure on people to go to university when other, better routes might be available to them.
I welcome the extent to which apprenticeships feature more heavily in parliamentary debate. The debate between the Government and the Opposition seems to be about how to create more and better apprenticeship places and how to fund them effectively, rather than whether we should do that, and that is to be welcomed. However, the higher education sector can do more to engage with the debate about apprenticeships, particularly on higher level and degree-level places. In that respect, the amendment would help to shift the public debate on life chances and opportunities and where and how people should participate in higher education and higher level skills in a positive direction, but it would also deal with the reality of Britain’s changing economy.
The fact is that however, Britain voted in the recent referendum, Britain’s future in this century is all about high-level skills and ensuring that we are competing effectively in the global race to provide better job opportunities. In the light of the referendum, there could be a reverse pressure to have deregulation of employment rights, a race to the bottom, more casualised labour and lower pay, and I do not think anyone would want that future for themselves or their children. By placing a greater emphasis on higher and degree-level apprenticeships, we can ensure that appropriate routes and genuine choice are available to every talented person growing up in Britain today and, indeed, to an older generation that will increasingly have to retrain and reskill to move into different employment paths. Those routes should not just be the conventional full-time higher education degree course that has traditionally been embraced by 18 to 22-year-olds, but more part-time higher education provision and, as the amendment alludes to, more higher and degree-level apprenticeship places.
Amendment 28 deals with another challenge that has been thrown up by public policy in recent years: the changing patterns of participation in higher education  among people of all ages. There is a degree of complacency about the extent to which the new fees and funding regime and the student finance regime have impacted on participation. There are still real concerns about part-time participation and mature student participation. Not enough evidence has been gathered about those who have the ability and the grades to participate in higher education but choose not to apply because of student finance issues.
To a degree, demography is masking a pattern there, although overall I am glad to see that many have not been deterred by the new student finance regime. None the less, it has had an impact on patterns of participation. In particular, more people are now choosing to study at local institutions. On one hand, that can be positive and advantageous: there are many good reasons for people choosing to study at a university closer to where they live. It could be that they have a particular commitment to family ties or place of worship. It could be that they have a job; they may be mature students and want to study part-time alongside their full-time work. It may be that, as students in sixth form they have been working part-time and would like to keep that job while studying at a local university.
For a potential student growing up in the capital city, as I did, there is really no problem at all, because you have the full breadth of higher education represented in London—traditional universities, modern universities, institutions that are small and specialist and excel in part-time provision. Those who grow up in London really are spoilt for choice, but there are across the country a series of higher education blackspots in terms of both the reach of local higher education institutions and problems and shortcomings that arise as patterns of course provision change. Amendment 28 would place a duty on the office for students to monitor the geographical distribution of higher education provision and encourage provision where there is a shortfall relative to local demand.
One of the unintended consequences of the marketisation of higher education is that, particularly with patterns of private provision, there is not necessarily the same public duty and public ethos that has traditionally existed in the higher education sector. As we heard in the oral evidence sessions, some courses are simply more expensive to provide, even if there is a clear public duty to do so. Some courses are more profitable than others, some less. I would dearly love a higher education framework that did not place such considerations at the forefront of university leaders and university finance directors’ minds, but I fear that in this brave new world where the market reigns supreme, there are real risks, which the amendment seeks to mitigate.
I hope that I have clearly set out the intentions behind amendments 15, 20 and 28. I think that they are consistent with the principles that the Government set out in the White Paper and with the wider objectives of the Bill, and I hope that they receive a favourable hearing from the Minister.

Gordon Marsden: I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing these amendments forward today. They are specific amendments but they touch on a much broader and more crucial aspect of the relationship between the Bill and the promotion of higher education skills. The Minister himself, on diverse occasions, not least in the  higher education White Paper, has rightly put enormous emphasis on the importance of high-level graduate skills. The statistics and projections quoted in the White Paper emphasised repeatedly that the driver for the changes in the Bill are that half of the job vacancies between now and 2022 are expected to be in occupations requiring high-level graduates. So the thrust of the higher education White Paper is very clear, but if you will the ends you also have to will the means. I think that what my hon. Friend touches on in his amendments, and certainly what we will touch on throughout consideration of the Bill, is the need to give the appropriate connectivity between the vocational and the academic sides of the Bill. That is what continues to concern and alarm me.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) asked in his Second Reading speech, does this include levels of technical, professional competence? I am bound to return to the point, to which I have not had a satisfactory response—indeed, since the machinery of government changes, these questions have become larger and louder, rather than quieter—of the link between what the Bill says about higher education and skills and what was said in the skills plan released by BIS in July. The need for cross-over between the skills plan and the Higher Education Bill is obvious, but I sat in the Chamber yesterday and heard the Secretary of State for Education’s statement about the forthcoming Bill that will come from the Green Paper and none of these issues—I am not blaming her specifically: she was addressing a range of other issues—have so far been addressed by the Bill. We know that the Bill was previously supposed to reflect some aspects of the skills plan; we know nothing more about that since the change of Government. If is not appropriate for the Minister to say something more specific about that on this amendment today, I urge him to take another occasion to talk about what that connectivity is going to be, because the devil is in the detail.
No one doubts the Government’s wish to take forward higher degree skills—they desperately need to do so in the post-Brexit climate and for all the other reasons that make this issue important—but if they do not have the mechanisms or the analysis to do it, it will not succeed. That is why I also welcome amendment 20 which provides for the OFS to co-operate with the Institute for Apprenticeships to develop a strategy for jointly registered higher education providers to increase provision of higher and degree level apprenticeship places.
I am bound to say to the Minister—perhaps he will convey this to the Minister of State, Department for Education, his right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who is of course the Minister for these matters, although I am sure he has heard it already—that we still have huge doubts about the capacity of the Institute for Apprenticeships to carry through the programme that the Government wish it to carry through, in particular in relation to higher skills. Again, that is not to doubt its bona fides—although its structure and appointments have been subject to some mishaps over the last 12 months as the Minister will be aware—but  its capacity. The staffing levels in the Skills Funding Agency are down nearly 50% since 2011; there has  been a continuing and accelerating decline in National Apprenticeship Service staffing; and the Government have effectively closed the UK Commission for Employment  and Skills. All of those press very hard on the Minister’s desire to see skills—and the delivery of skills includes degree apprenticeships—being effectively achieved. It means that Ministers will struggle to deliver the ambitious designs and targets that they laid out in “English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision” and those include targets highly specific to this Bill and to what the Minister wants to see.
We know that under the previous Government funding arrangements were protected in the Department for Education but not in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The consequences were the sort of cuts that I have described, not just in programmes but in staffing, that left me and a range of people—including Baroness Wolf, the EEF, the CBI and the Federation of Small Businesses—very doubtful about the Government’s ability to achieve the sorts of targets they talked about in the White Paper and that they want to deliver with the assistance of the Bill. So it is important that the Minister addresses those issues and, again, if he is not able to do so in detail today, that he is in a position at some point—hopefully having consulting with the right hon. Member for Harlow—to say a little bit more about the connectivity.
I also want to touch on what my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North said about amendment 28. He is right to draw attention to the changing patterns of participation and the need for that to be reflected in the objectives of the OFS. He is also right to talk about the issues with finance. I am the first to say that finance—and the incentives or disincentives for people to participate—is a complicated subject. At the risk of sounding like a Select Committee veteran, I sat on Select Committees in the mid-2000s where we heard lots of evidence and projections about what would happen to the participation of students if fees were increased to a certain level. Some older Committee Members may remember the strong evidence that Claire Callender gave from her participation surveys.
It is fair to say that some of those alarmist projections did not come to pass—or certainly not in the way in which they were originally put forward. Just because some things do not come to pass, though, does not mean that the pips will not squeak at some point under any future Government. That is our strong argument on the trebling of tuition fees, and other issues that we will deal with later. The pips have a habit of squeaking in different ways. To some extent, the pips have not squeaked for the traditional cohort between 18 and 22, but they have certainly squeaked for adult and part-time students and in lifelong learning provision.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North also talked about the importance of the involvement of people who want to enter higher education and get degrees and qualifications locally. As I said on Second Reading, and will continue to say, further education colleges, which provide more than 10% of higher education, are crucial in this process. This comes back to what my hon. Friend said about the situation in London. It is true that in London students can access different types of courses, in different places in a relatively limited geographical area. Transport for London is now able to  do better-structured deals for people, though that does not affect the fact that cost and time are involved in that process.
Outside London—in my constituency and others—it is critical that people, whether young or adult, are able to get the courses they need in the cold spot areas. That is one of the reasons for the many concerns that mergers between colleges under the area review process are particularly harmful to the social fabric and social mobility of people in rural and suburban areas who wish to participate. That is not simply participating in FE courses, but in HE access courses at FE colleges and, increasingly, HE degree courses—the Bill gives powers to FE colleges in that respect. The area reviews, in turn, threaten to make those situations much worse.
It is also true that we cannot always predict the way in which people will want to take their higher education in the future. That is particularly true in the mature sector. When I was a course tutor for the Open University before 1997, the majority of my students were returning women in their thirties and forties on the particular courses I taught. That was the pattern in the Open University for older people. In recent years, not just with the Open University but with Birkbeck and other institutions, that demographic pattern has widened. We are now getting a lot of younger people in their late 20s and early 30s, sometimes in employment or having had a couple of jobs that did not work out, who want to go back on a part-time basis. It is important that everything that the Government’s proposals encourage those people and give them flexible programmes, so that we do not have structures that cause the sort of problems I have described. My hon. Friend’s amendments, although very specific—and no less potent for that—raise some much broader issues that I trust we will return to.

Jo Johnson: The hon. Gentleman asked about degree apprenticeships. I point him towards provisional figures, released in June, that show a dramatic increase in the number of people starting higher apprenticeships. The official figures show that there were more than 37,000 people participating in a higher apprenticeship between August 2015 and April 2016. The figures also show that there are more young people starting apprenticeships, with more than 108,000 starts by under-19s between 2015 and 2016.
We would not agree with the hon. Gentleman on his points about funding. The spending review was a good settlement for the skills and FE sector. We will double spending on apprenticeships by 2019-20 from 2010-11 cash terms, including through the new levy, and will protect the £1.5 billion funding for the core adult skills participation budget, in cash terms.
The combination of the levy, the protection of the adult education budget, the extension of loans and the introduction of the youth obligation mean that by the end of the Parliament, the cash value of core adult technical education funding to support participation will be at its highest ever. The total spending power of the FE sector to support participation will be £3.41 billion by 2019-20, which is a cash-terms increase of 40% compared with 2015-16, and 30% in real terms. The area review programme that the hon. Gentleman mentioned aims to put the FE college sector on a strong financial footing, so that it is better able to meet the educational and economic needs of local areas, including at higher levels.
To finish my comments about the links with the FE reforms under way elsewhere in the Department, led by my able colleague, the Minister of State, Department for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, with whom I have regular conversations, even though he is new to his post, I remind the hon. Member for Blackpool South of the support for the entirety of our package of reforms from the Association of Colleges, which said:
“Choice, access and quality are the welcome watchwords of the Government’s long-awaited plans to open up higher education and to allow more colleges to award HE qualifications. This step change away from the country’s traditional university system will empower more people than ever before to access HE in their local area through a college. It will also provide a wider choice of courses that are linked to employment.”
In response to the higher education White Paper, the AOC said:
“We welcome much of the Bill’s content, as it has been one of AoC’s key long-standing policy objectives to make it easier and quicker for high performing institutions, including colleges, to achieve their own awarding powers.”

Roberta Blackman-Woods: Amendment 160, which falls within this group, seeks establish on the face of the Bill that one of the general duties of the OFS should be to have regard to the public interest when making its decisions. As we have already discussed this morning, the Bill has a strong focus on an explicitly pro-competition approach to the delivery of higher education, where students are seen as consumers. I fear that simply categorising the higher education sector as a consumption market fails to recognise the wider economic and societal benefits that the sector contributes. I have therefore tabled this amendment to recognise that the sector should not be seen just as an arena for transactions between student consumers and university providers, but also as a sector that acts in the public interest.
All universities in the UK are more than just places where students go to get a degree or a qualification. They are dedicated to research, innovation and the development both of ideas—they are perhaps not very fashionable at the moment but they are very necessary—and of students and academics, whose full potential universities seek to achieve. As the Minister said earlier, they also contribute not only to the local economy but to the national economy. They provide sporting opportunities and cultural facilities locally, and represent a very positive image of the UK internationally. The amendment seeks to ensure that that is recognised by the OFS.
This issue was picked up by a number of our witnesses when they were giving evidence to the Committee. Professor Simon Gaskell of Universities UK said:
“We certainly favour inclusion in the Bill of a clause that indicates that there is a responsibility for the public good of institutions that wish to call themselves universities”.––[Official Report, Higher Education and Research Public Bill Committee, 6 September 2016; c. 12, Q12.]
It is a bit odd, or a bit remiss, that there is nothing in the general duties of the OFS to reflect that wider public good. I would like to see that in the Bill, as I have said. If the public interest is not to be safeguarded through an amendment to clause 2, perhaps when the Minister responds to the points that I and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South have made, he could indicate to the Committee where the public interest  is safeguarded.

Gordon Marsden: Because of the lateness of our proceedings I do not intend to respond in great detail, but I profoundly disagree with his cavalier interpretation of what one needs to do on validation. We can talk about bad examples across the board, but this will go from one situation to another. Individual organisations, whether Condé Nast or any other, will have to go through a proper process—that is the whole point of the thing. As we come to other aspects of the Bill we will see why the Government’s attitude toward new providers risks creating many problems for students. On this occasion, because the hour is late and we are about to conclude the session, I do not intend to press our  amendments to a vote, but I assure the Minister we will return to the issue in some detail elsewhere in the Bill. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.